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‘All aboard the EU charabanc. Your driver for the next six months is Tony’

Geoff Meade takes a light-hearted look at life in the European UnionFarewell then, Luxembourg, and thank you for your presidency.

European Voice

1/7/98, 5:00 PM CET

Updated 4/12/14, 2:48 AM CET

We enjoyed the journey, even though we did not go as far as some of the passengers had hoped. However, the ride was very smooth – so smooth, in fact, that one or two sitting in the back reckoned that we were parked for some of the time.

Now, will the next driver step forward please.

So far so good for the United Kingdom. Eight days in and it’s steady as she goes.

This will come as a relief to the federalists, ever watchful because Tony Blair is one of the new kids in the bloc and certainly the youngest, and he just might grab the steering-wheel of the European Union charabanc and yank it the wrong way, with disastrous consequences for all 14 passengers on board.

Heavens, the lad can barely see over the dashboard. He has only just qualified for his EU driving licence, although it is fair to say that the driving test these days is far tougher to get through than the one sat by some of the more experienced helmsmen in this particular driver’s club.

European Commission President Jacques Santer made a very telling remark in The Hague exactly a year ago this week.

He was sitting on the platform with Dutch Prime Minister and driver-on-duty Wim Kok as the Netherlands outlined its EU presidency priorities.

When Santer spoke, it was to express grateful thanks that the “buggin’s turn” presidency system had finally thrown up two pro-federalist countries in succession – the Netherlands and then Luxembourg – to enable the process of integration to get a thoroughly good shove in the right direction before we were placed in the dubious hands of the British and then the untested hands of the Austrians.

He didn’t put it quite like that, but that is exactly what he meant and one could only sympathise: imagine watching over a shiny big bus that you have been told to keep polished and performing like new, only to watch a stream of drivers, some competent, some hesitiant, others reckless, grab the wheel and speed off into the unknown.

How nice, if only for a brief time, to have a couple of drivers in charge who you know will drive steadily and safely, and in the right direction.

It is a well-known fact that any vehicle which is driven by lots of different people each with a different driving technique and, let’s face it, different standards of driving instruction, will suffer from a slipping clutch, a crunchy gearbox and slack steering within a very short time.

The charabanc that the European Union founding fathers designed is now in the hands of 15 very different drivers, and many more are queueing up for a turn. The bus has already had major modifications, improved seating, three-point seat belts and safety glass all round, but it can only stand so much.

Perhaps, bearing in mind that it is impossible at this late stage to alter the basic design of the vehicle fundamentally, it is time to consider appointing a full-time chauffeur, with a full-time team of navigators, mechanics and bodywork specialists to keep the old jalopy up to the mark.

No one will say it out loud, but a lot of people would have liked to have shuffled the presidency pack so that the bus did not pass the mile-post marked with the identitities of the 1999 single currency countries engraved upon it with a non-believer at the wheel.

What bad luck! There are only four, apparently, non-starters for the 1999 Euro challenge and one of them will be in charge when the single currency trumpet voluntary is sounded.

That’s what you get when you run a random rotating presidency, but it is a form of democracy. It is the kind of democracy which gives the job of organising piss-ups in breweries to anyone, qualified or not.

It means our European Union charabanc is sometimes seen speeding in built-up areas and at others, unaccountably poodling along in the fast lane of the motorway. It is why the car will suddenly take a left turn without signalling and later attempt a right-turn where there isn’t one. Sometimes it will even try a U-turn, oblivious to all the other traffic.

This brings to mind the joyous observation, after the Italian presidency before last, that the EU bus had been driven for six months by the Marx Brothers.

The joy of this drive-share system is that nobody can ever be accused of bad driving, because to the outsider it is not always obvious who is at the wheel at any particular time. And besides, everyone takes responsibility for the whole journey, even if they were sleeping in the back when the thing hit a particularly nasty wall or knocked down a little old lady on a pedestrian crossing.

No individual can be blamed because, rather like the plot of Agatha Christie’s mystery Murder On the Orient Express, everyone dunnit.

And so here we are on day eight of our British charabanc ride. Not a bump or a broken exhaust-pipe to report and everything is going along serenely. No one has yet suffered from motion sickness. No one has asked to get off.

During our journey we are due to pass, amongst other places, Edinburgh, York, Birmingham and Cardiff.

Sometime in March we will even glimpse far-off lands like Slovakia, Estonia and, possibly, Turkey. But their representatives will not yet be allowed on to the bus, and certainly nowhere near the driving seat.

No, for the moment there is little to report. The British are acknowledged across Europe as good drivers. It’s just that they have this reputation for refusing to go where the majority of passengers wish to be taken. It remains to be seen whether that is still true.

What is clear is that it will take more than a bad driver, or a series of them, to halt the journey. This charabanc may falter from time to time, but it will never run out of steam.